


Spool and Twine

by rabbit_hearted



Category: Purple Hyacinth - Ephemerys & Sophism (Webcomic)
Genre: F/M, lots of yelling and HR threats, so you know how lauki would be if hr deparments existed in the early 20th century
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:54:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25676185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabbit_hearted/pseuds/rabbit_hearted
Summary: Neither of them can definitively say what precipitated their rivalry. Perhaps they took one look at one another and realized that they were both too electric to exist in the same room without causing something catastrophic.Or: Lauren and Kieran being confused about their feelings, but in 2020.
Relationships: Lauren Sinclair/Kieran White
Comments: 21
Kudos: 117





	Spool and Twine

**Author's Note:**

> No one:  
> Rabbit:  
> No one:  
> Rabbit: Fine, Modern Office Rivals AU.
> 
> So, this is a little experiment in dialogue-driven storytelling. I figured that a modern AU provided the creative environment to accomplish the task, as it requires little world-building and context. Avoiding verbose descriptors and prose-poeticism is rather challenging for me (she says, surprising no one). Anyway! On with the show!

“I heard you had a date last night.” 

He says it the way you might say, _It’s supposed to rain tomorrow,_ or _What are you bringing to the potluck?_ Feather-light and curved a little around the corners, tipped up like a grin. When she looks up, his eyes are placid waters, narrowed slightly, as though she’s just posed a very perplexing question. 

“I’m sure it was very cute.” Kieran steeples his hands on his abdomen and leans back a little in his chair, looking princely. “I’d wager he commented on your pretty, pensive eyes.” 

“It’s none of your business.” Lauren expels a breath through her teeth in a controlled hiss. “In fact, _nothing_ I do is your business.” She makes a show of typing in her computer password with unnecessary force, like hail glancing against pavement. “Who even told you that?”

“Kym,” Kieran replies. “Was this one married, too?” Her gaze darts up from her computer screen. He looks marvelous today, a marble-cut Aidoneus in a cream button-down. Where the fluorescent lighting of the Precinct has the effect of making anyone look a little pallid, Kieran gleams in it.

“You’re acting awfully familiar, intern,” Lauren replies. Her syllables are long and lazy, circled with barbed wire. Lauren had been assigned to show him around the precinct when he first started as their archivist, and when another Officer had asked if Kieran was her _intern,_ she had grinned wickedly and cemented the nickname in stone. “Incessant personal questions are subject to internal review, per HR policy.” 

“You’ve got me there, Officer,” Kieran drawls, spinning a pen in his fingertips. 

She spends the remainder of the morning finishing her paperwork and militantly avoiding him, but his watchful eye in her periphery is a beacon over black waters, quietly tempting. Shortly after lunch that afternoon, her phone vibrates with an incoming text. 

_James Coffeeshop: I had fun yesterday. We should do that again sometime._

“This one has a way with words,” a voice purrs. Lauren spins to find Kieran standing over her shoulder, near enough that she can smell the resinous scent of the archives on his skin — pine and old leather and something sharp, like camphor. “How charming. You’ll be Mrs. Lauren Coffeeshop in no time.” 

“I wonder,” Lauren replies, pressing her index finger to her chin in an expression of contemplation, “What HR might have to say about you snooping through your coworker’s text messages.” 

Kieran snorts derisively. “I wasn’t snooping. Your phone was out in plain sight. I just happened to be walking by.” 

“Right,” Lauren scoffs, smiling humorlessly, “And if you keep prodding at my personal life, my fist might just _happen_ to end up in the vicinity of your face.” She shrugs lightly. “Who’s to say?” 

Kieran’s jaw swings open in exaggerated shock. “My, my, Officer!” He pantomimes clutching at a string of pearls. “A threat of physical violence? I can’t image HR-”

Lauren springs up from her desk, fluid as a bathwater. When she leans forward to grip his wrist, she dully registers the softness and warmth of his palm in hers, the inexplicable _rightness_ of it, and then banishes the observation just as swiftly. “If you threaten to report me to HR _one more time_ , I will-” 

“Aye, Lauren!”

Kym’s voice has the effect of popping the tension like a needle to a balloon. They simultaneously freeze in place, as though performing an improv comedy sketch. Kym drops her voice to a simpering purr. “Hello, Kieran.” Her gaze locks on Lauren’s fingers, still curled around Kieran’s cufflink, like a heat-seeking missile. 

“What’re you two talking about?” Kym sidles up beside Kieran and offers him a slice of her watermelon, as though they’re old confidantes. Lauren drops his palm and dusts her own against her pant leg in a fit of childish impudence as her narrowed gaze slides slowly from Kieran to Kym. “Et tu, Brute?” she mutters.

Kieran grins cheekily and takes a relishing bite. 

“We were discussing Lauren’s date,” Kieran replies. 

“ _We_ weren’t discussing anyth-”

“Ah, the barista.” Kym’s expression grows wistful as she ticks off her fingers. “Funny, charming, well-educated…” 

“Sounds great,” Kieran remarks speculatively, fixing Lauren with an unreadable look. 

Kym shrugs and volleys the watermelon rind into a nearby trash can. “I don’t mind this one, compared to the usual suspects. Seems nice.” 

“Is that so?” 

“So far, he’s fared better than the married guy … or the drug dealer … or the politician who was embezzling his campaign funds-”

Lauren coughs. “Alright, we get it, Kym.”

“Well, who doesn’t love a nice guy?” Kieran deadpans. His tone is a little too clipped, like chalk scraping gravel. When he stalks away, Kym blows a long whistle through her teeth and glances at Lauren pointedly. 

Lauren turns back to her computer, inexplicably chagrined. “Don’t ask me,” she murmurs.

  
  
  


Neither of them can definitively say what precipitated their rivalry. Perhaps they took one look at one another and realized that they were both too electric to exist in the same room without causing something catastrophic. Lauren bitterly maintains that he was unkind to her first, and Kieran, in turn, claims that she was predisposed to despise him through no fault of his own. 

Today, however, is a statistical anomaly: They hardly fight at all. 

Lauren arrives to work late, and Kieran realizes something is wrong when he finds her in the kitchen fixing herself a mug of tea rather than her usual coffee. The apples of her cheeks are a little rosied with a feverish flush. 

“English breakfast?” He asks, tipping his chin in the mug’s direction. 

“I’m not feeling well,” she replies, for once too spent to conjure up a snappy retort. When he doesn’t leave, her eyes narrow suspiciously. “Will that be all, Kieran?”

 _“Kieran?”_ He replies. He leans forward and presses the back of his palm against her forehead. “Now I _know_ you’re sick. You never call me Kieran.” 

Lauren swats his hand away. “Yeah, whatever.” She kneads her temples with her fingertips, suddenly tight with a tension headache. “I don’t have the energy to reply to that. Pretend I said something witty.” 

“Seriously, though.” he cocks his hip against the countertop, watching her stir a packet of sugar into her mug. “You should just go home. You look like death warmed over.” 

“Gee, thanks. Is this your version of charming?” 

“Not to fear, Sinclair.” His lips tip up coyly, but his eyes bear no trace of humor. “If I were trying to charm you, you’d know.” 

She does her best to ignore the pesky little spark that rockets up her spine at that last statement and leaves him standing in the kitchen. Despite all of her efforts, the imprint of his disquieting expression lingers.

When she returns from patrol that afternoon, Will orders her to take the rest of the afternoon off. 

“Kieran told me you’re sick,” he says, scrawling a dismissal note onto a legal pad. He glances up at her and grins crookedly. “We figured that this was the only way to get you to slow down.” 

“Thanks, Will.” 

Lauren takes the long route home, all the while feeling that, somehow, Kieran has tipped the ball squarely into her court. 

  
  
  


Throughout the weekend, Lauren can’t stop thinking about the dark haze of his blown pupils watching her, like ink through running water. She hates that he’s done this to her, as though he’s complicit in his wanderings through her subconscious. 

By the time Monday rolls around, she’s wound tight with frustration. She speaks in clipped fragments and buries herself in her work, even declining Kym’s offer to take their lunch break together. By five o’clock, she’s bleary-eyed and unfocused and her fingertips ring with phantom tension. 

“My, my, Officer.” Kieran regards her down his nose and clicks his tongue. “Your mood is even blacker than usual today. You’ve hardly been in the mood to play with me at all.” 

Lauren pulls her pistol from her holster and fiddles with the chamber meaningfully. He can’t deny that the sight of her twisting the cold metal between her palms does something to him — that self-assured grip, the quietly powerful tilt of her shoulder blades, pitched forward just so. 

“Is that meant to be a threat?” Kieran tilts his head charmingly, like a dog with a bone. “I wonder what HR would have to say about -”

“Not a threat." Her gaze narrows to slits. "A reminder.” 

“A reminder that you have the ability to shoot me? I think they might have a word for that somewhere in the English lexicon…” Kieran hums musingly, then leans forward with a snap of his fingers. “Oh! Right. I think that word is _threat.”_

“It would do you some good to learn a thing or two about self-preservation,” Lauren replies. “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” she plants her elbows on her desk and tilts her chin into her steepled palms, “Why did you tell Will that I was sick on Friday?”

Kieran leans back, regarding her curiously. “You looked like you were about to keel over. Corpses are bad for workplace morale.” 

“But why did you care?” She draws her lower lip between her teeth. “What’s in it for you?”

“What’s in it for me,” Kieran drawls. A muscle in his jaw tenses. His gaze darts fitfully to his shoes, then the ceiling, and then, finally, back to her face. 

He's about to reply when Will suddenly stops at her desk to ask her about the status of a report she’s been working on for him. Something in Kieran grows stifled and restless at the change in her demeanor — she flips a switch and suddenly her expression is illuminated, softened at the edges. When she smiles, it’s not one of the flinty ones Kieran is used to receiving from her, but a real one, with a brilliant flash of teeth and dimples at the edges. 

After he leaves, Lauren turns to catch Kieran watching her. His stare clashes with hers head-on, both too petulant to look away.

“What?” she snaps. 

He opens his mouth, then snaps it shut again. The strange, fragile moment evaporates like vapor. 

“ **Nothing at all, Officer** ,” he replies. 

  
  
  


“Good morning, Lauren!” Lila chirps. Lauren turns to find the receptionist beaming toothily at her. As far as humans go, she is an impossibly cute one, like an oversized Polly Pocket. 

“Good morning, Lila.” 

Lila’s face is partially obscured by a bouquet of roses arranged artfully in a stained glass vase. She sighs wistfully, cupping her chin in her palm. “These arrived for you this morning. How romantic!”

“For … me?” Lauren replies dumbly, plucking the tiny white card from between the stems. Her cheeks flame with heat when she reads the note scrawled onto the cardstock: _See you on Friday. -J_

Lauren presses her lips together, suddenly desperate to burst into flames, or sink beneath the floorboards. “Thanks, Lila.” She pinches a petal between her fingertips gingerly, as though inspecting a foreign object with clinical interest. 

When Kieran arrives to find them on her desk, a nefarious expression dawns on his features. “Roses, huh?” 

He sets his coffee down on his desk and drops into his chair, legs crossed casually at the ankles. “It seems as though Mr. Coffeeshop isn’t so perfect after all. He’s made two key errors.” 

“Fine. I’ll humor you,” she replies absently, still drafting an email. He’s wearing suspenders today and somehow manages to achieve an ‘antiquated cool’ aesthetic without veering into hipster. “What are the errors?”

“Firstly,” Kieran says, “You hate public displays. You find them embarrassing.” 

Lauren’s eyes narrow, but she tips her head gamely, as if to say, _Go on._

“And secondly, he should have chosen daisies. Those are your favorite.” 

Her fingers freeze over her keyboard. “How did you know that?” 

“It may come as a surprise to you, Officer, but I’m not a complete caveman. I notice things. Particularly things about you.” 

Lauren rolls her chair away from her desk and crosses her arms. “Why?” 

“I find you interesting.”

“But — _why?”_ She breathes. 

“Because,” he drops his voice to a murmur, and it has the effect of sucking out all of the noise of the precinct like a vacuum. Lauren, spellbound, finds herself leaning forward. “Because if I were lucky enough to be able to take you on a date, I’d pay attention.” 

  
  
  


“Alright, that’s it.” 

Kym’s palms come down hard on Lauren’s desk, stirring her out of her reverie with a metallic crack. She fixes them with the same look she uses when she’s supervising the firearms exams with the new cadets: pitch-dark and chilled, like the depth of a pond. 

“What is going on with you two?” 

Both of their gazes dart up guiltily, as though they’ve been caught with their hands poised over the cookie jar. 

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Lauren replies. 

“You know, you’d think being a human lie detector would make you a convincing liar yourself,” Kym replies, pushing herself up onto the edge of Lauren’s desk. “But as it turns out, you still suck at it. You two have been acting weird all week. Out with it.”

Lauren shifts in his seat. “I don’t-” 

“The other day, I noticed how quiet it was,” Kym interrupts, gesturing her index finger between them. “And then I realized it was because you two weren’t arguing. I thought it was just a fluke.” 

“I had a spiritual awakening. Arguing with Officer Sinclair is bad for my health.” Kieran folds his palms behind his neck and leans back, spinning lazy circles in his chair. “Besides,” he shrugs, “She starts it.” 

“Are you out of your mind? _You’re_ the one-”

“See, Sargaent Ladell?” Kieran takes a languid sip of his coffee, eyes brightened with mischief over the rim of his mug. 

Kym’s mouth flattens into a line. “You two need to kiss and make up.”

Kieran coughs, sputtering rivulets of coffee onto his collar.   
  


After work on Friday, Lauren slips into the bathroom and changes into a gauzy yellow sundress that clings to her curves in buttery waves. She looks so pretty that Kieran misses his cue to say something sarcastic. She spends a long moment watching him, one brow cocked into her hairline. 

“ **Yellow isn’t your color** ,” he quips mildly, but he might as well have said “You look beautiful”, and they both know it. 

She takes her time packing up her purse and persistently avoiding the intensity of his stare, as though her tube of Chapstick is the most fascinating item in the world. But she can _feel_ him, thrumming somewhere beyond her periphery with that low vibration frequency, steady as a bassline. 

“Can you _stop doing that?_ ” She hisses. 

“Doing what, pray tell?” 

“You exist so _loudly.”_

The tips of her ears burn when he throws his head back in laughter, wide enough to bare his molars. “What on _earth_ are you talking about?” 

She tosses her hands up, as though pantomiming a manic puppet show. “Exactly what I said. You exist so loudly. It’s ridiculous. And you’re always looking at me.” 

“Is that so?” He takes a languid stride forward, as though he’s stepped out for an afternoon stroll. His tie is a little crooked, and her fingers itch to straighten it, or curve around his neck and squeeze. She can never tell whether she wants to kiss him or kill him. It’s quite perplexing. 

“Yes,” Lauren replies, a little breathy. He’s right in front of her now, close enough that the toes of his wingtips nearly touch hers. She can see that his eyes have a little bit of green in them close to the pupil, like algae in the center of a tide-pool. 

“Maybe I like looking at you, Officer.” Her eyes instinctively fall shut when his fingertips brush the column of her throat, drifting over the skin there like piano keys.

“Are you about to kill me?” She asks. Kieran threads his fingers through the hair at the nape of her neck and it splinters her sensibilities clean in half.

“ **Yes** ,” he replies dryly. “The perfect crime, strangling a police officer in broad daylight in the precinct where they work.” He tips her chin up with the crook of his finger.

“Do it, then,” she replies. She pops one eye open, a rush of liquid gold. “Or are you-”

They meet with eyes wide open, sharpened steel on scorched magma. A burning flame in a darkened room, a shift of tectonic plates underwater. He slants his mouth against hers tauntingly, as if to ask her a question. The kiss itself is chaste, a mere brush, an accidental glance. His palms flatten gentlemanly at her waist, hers folded in his lapels. 

And then it’s passed, like a cloud rolling over the crest of a hill. She stumbles back and presses the pad of her thumb against her mouth, still burning, like the afterglow of a sunburn.

“Why did you do that?” She glances around, as though searching for witnesses. 

“If I recall, you seemed fairly … participatory.” Something dark shifts over his expression, twists his mouth into a vague imprint of a scowl. But then he blinks and it’s gone, melted back within that familiar mask of indifference. 

“You were just trying to mess me up before my date. This was-” She scrubs at her face. “This was some sort of _joke-_ ”

“Really, Officer?” Kieran spits. They face each other, hair mussed and chests heaving, a Renaissance tableau of primal want. Something like hurt flickers in his eyes, struck bright blue by the electrical conductor of frustration. “So that’s what you think this was.” He grins humorlessly and tips his palms towards her. “ **Sure, a joke. You got me.** I surrender.” 

The slam of the door cuts her like a lightning bolt. 

  
  
  


The third date is perfectly fine. Fine and nice and good, a little collection of lukewarm adjectives, stacked in rows like toy soldiers. When he walks her to the parking lot, she expects that he’ll try for a kiss. It is, as first kisses go, a sensible setup: The air is thick and heavy with the scent of dampened earth after a fresh rain, the moon bright and telescopically clear. If you were to ask a hundred people to describe their ideal setting for a first kiss, it would probably look something like this. 

But when she looks at him, hair tangled with dew, lips parted in a pretty picture of infatuation, she feels nothing at all. 

His crestfallen expression gnaws at her during her walk home. She had the good sense to decline his polite offer to drive her home, opting to avoid an exchange of hollow pleasantries, or, worse, stewing in silence. Salt and brine tangle in her hair as she stands on the bridge, gazing unseeingly unseeingly at the water, blackened like an oil slick at the late hour. 

“That bad, huh?” 

She finds Kieran standing in a slice of moonlight, brilliant and untouchable, like light glancing off of sharpened steel. 

“It was fine,” she says. 

“But…” 

“But.” Her hands curl around the edge of the railing. 

“Ah.”

“You know,” she says, “We might try being friends, for a change.” 

When he frowns, his watery reflection follows. “Friends,” he says. “Is it even worth it? After all this?” 

She sighs. “I suppose not.” 

  
  
  


A month later, when she arrives to find his desk emptied, Lauren tells herself that she shouldn’t be surprised. 

“He requested a transfer to a different precinct,” Kym tells her. “Said the tenth is closer to his new apartment.” 

“Right,” Lauren replies. “Of course.”

She tells herself that she shouldn’t care at all.

And yet. _Yet._

Over the year that follows, they drift through the passing seasons, entangled in the complacency of routine. She dates more men, but none who make her feel as though she’s standing on the crest of a hill in a lightning storm. None who make her feel as though she is both the kite and the spark, the danger and the prey. 

It isn’t until she sees his name on a flyer, eleven letters bolted to a telephone pole. An art exhibition at the old church in downtown Greychapel. A time and a place, a spool and twine. 

She copies the details into her phone before she can think better of it.

  
  
  


Twelve canvases perched among the crumbling pillars and the snaking vines. They look right here, somehow, as though they sprouted from the bones of this place. Feverish visions, immortalized in charcoal and paint: Some composed of the vaguest strokes of pencil to paper, like an exhalation, others, furious, intersecting lines and geometric calculation, and others, still, delicate renderings of transient faces, crowded rooms, quiet requiems.

When she places him in the room, she feels a surge of pride she has no right to lay claim to. It’s a strange feeling, like hearing someone else describe a memory enough that it begins to feel like your own. 

She slips through the crowd like a whisper, passing through muted, speculative conversations, declining offers of Pinot Grigio and hors d'oeuvres, avoiding him but unable to ignore him all the same. 

He finds her standing in front of the final piece, perched at the base of the altar. A furious, blood red sunset — layered shades of crimson and carmine and salmon, in some places so thick it layers on the canvas like the raised lip of a mountain on a topographical map. A composition of steel and salt, save for the brilliant streak of gold, bisecting the sky like a crooked scar. 

“You came.” 

She spins and finds him regarding her warmly. 

“I lay down my sword.” She tips her head, narrowing her eyes slightly. “For tonight, at least.” 

“I wasn’t much of an archivist, but I’d like to think I’m rather proficient with a canvas.”

She grins. “You weren’t so bad, for an intern.”

“Well, it was just a job to put me through graduate school.”

She looks down, brows pulled together. “I didn’t know you were in graduate school, then.”

“Fine arts. It seems we know rather little of each other, after all.” He falls silent, inspecting her in his quiet, knowing way. “I’m glad you came.”

“I am, too.” She turns back to the canvas. “Your work is beautiful, but …”

“But?”

She sighs. “I’ve never been able to interpret art. The meaning, I mean.” 

He chuckles. “You don’t see it?” 

She frowns. “What do you mean?”

He presses his lips together. “Perhaps I haven’t succeeded in the recreation.” He tips his gaze to her, and then back to the canvas meaningfully. 

”Oh,” she breathes. Her cheeks flame with heat, and he is struck again by her beauty, awash in a cut of hazy light through the stained glass, something of a vision in chrome and flush. Hot, vibrant technicolor in the solemnity of this worshipping place.

“Oh,” he says, and smiles.   
  
  


“Was it worth it? After all this?” 

They are adrift and inconsequential in an Ardhalis afternoon. She presses her thumb into the spine of her book and glances up at him, perched on the edge of his stool, blackened fingertips suspended over canvas. 

“We wasted so much time,” she says. “I was so _blind_.” 

“Ah, I rather think we both were.” He wipes his hands on a cloth and crosses the room to her. His apartment is fossilized in golden hour, baked in pleasant warmth. She sighs when he presses his lips to her temple. “However, I do enjoy arguing with you, you little shrew.” 

“Tch. No one riles me up quite like you.” She pulls back to regard his face, bright with affection. “Strange, the way that hate is awfully similar to love.”

He brushes the pad of his thumb over her smile, an easy one, devoid of barbed wire. “Strange indeed, Officer. But-”

“Hm?”

He presses his lips to hers, assuredly, as if to give her an answer.

“I find that I do prefer to be on the same side, after all.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, as always, for reading! 
> 
> -Rabbit


End file.
